Margalida Caimari Vila

Margalida Caimari i Vila was born in Cuba to a well-to-do Minorcan family who had emigrated to the Caribbean for business reasons. She married Miquel Bauló i Oliver, a member of the liberal commercial bourgeoisie, which helped her to have more education and freedom than most women of her background. Supported by the Renaixença-leader Josep Lluís Pons i Gallarza, as a young woman she not only wrote poetry but recited poems in public at different times, which was very unusual for a woman around 1869. She was part of a group of young writers who moved inside the Ateneo Balear and the gathering of Pons and Gallarza.[1]

Her most innovative poetry is the realistic one of popular inspiration and the patriotic one; In the first one, she excels at explaining the feelings of solitude and impotence of the woman who hopes the husband emigrated to Cuba. In the second, the idea of Catalan homeland is very clear and admires industrialization. She was able to carry out an important literary activity, with her own talk, and of social beneficence because she had only one daughter, unlike other writers, such as Manuela de los Herreros Sorà, with whom she established friendship, who saw her work collapsed because of maternity. She published both in magazines in Mallorca and in Catalonia.[1]

She approached the social question from Catholicism according to the guidelines of Leo XIII, she knew at first hand the work of the textile workers by the company of his husband, "La Alfombrera", and she was very active in founding for the children of the workers the Bressols del Minyó Jesus, in imitation of those of Catalonia. At the age of 71, she inaugurated the day schools for working children. She reflected, however, her social conservatism in some poems.[1]

She was valued as a poet by Jeroni Rosselló, Miquel dels Sants Oliver, Manuel Sanchis i Guarner, Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria but, pressed by the stereotype, only valued and reproduced the maternal poems. She has a street in her name in Palma, the city where she was educated.